Extra lanes speed up San Ysidro crossing

Empty northbound vehicle lanes at the entrance to the San Ysidro Port of Entry on a Friday night in April 2013. A pause in construction allowed the opening of additional lanes and reduced congestion.
David maung

The weekend will allow the agency to estimate how many inspectors will be needed to keep wait times down once the port is expanded, said Rudy Camacho, a former U.S. Customs chief in San Diego who is now a private consultant.

“Shame on us if they’re not ready to utilize the investment that’s been made,” said Camacho. “We have to have sufficient personnel and overtime funding. These land border crossings are the economic lifeblood of this region.”

Any figures for what it would cost to pay for additional customs inspectors were not available. The Customs and Border Protection office in San Diego deferred any funding questions to the agency’s headquarters in Washington D.C., where a spokeswoman, Stephanie Malin, said the agency is “unable to comment on staffing or budgets at this time.”

Jason M-B Wells, director of the San Ysidro Chamber of Commerce, said the weekend test “just goes to show what those of us who live here have known all along: They can make it work if they want to.”

Federal officials have promised that the long waits will drop with completion of the planned $583 million upgrade of the San Ysidro Port of Entry, which would expand the port’s capacity to 63 inspection booths for northbound vehicles and include a new pedestrian processing facility. But with only the first phase funded by Congress, the timing of the project’s completion has remained uncertain.

Meanwhile, the long waits continue to cause steep economic costs for both sides of the border. Claudio Arriola, a regional leader of Canieti, Mexico’s chamber for electronics, telecommunications and information technologies, said the border congestion has thwarted his attempts to bring down potential investors from San Diego to Tijuana.

“Nobody wants to wait a long time in line to go back,” said Arriola. Despite talk of a single region, Arriola said “it’s getting harder than ever to do business.”

The long border waits are “more than just lost time,” said Cindy Gompper-Graves, chief executive officer of the South County Regional Economic Development Council. “You have health risks when you have people standing at the border for hours on end. This is about quality of life, an economic asset, the quality of the environment,” she said. “Maybe we tightened security so quickly that we haven’t as quickly addressed the impacts that are associated with more secure border crossings, and haven’t put the same amount of resources to address those impacts.”

For 28-year-old Wendy Mayo, a Tijuana resident who crosses several times a week in the pedestrian line, getting to her job at the Home Depot near Imperial Beach off Palm Avenue on Saturday meant waking up at 2:30 a.m. at her house in Colonia Libertad.

Though San Ysidro is far closer to both her home and her job, Mayo said she avoids the long pedestrian lines there by driving to the Otay Mesa crossing and parking her car. On Saturday, she crossed in minutes at Otay using her U.S. passport card in the pedestrian Ready Lane, set aside for those with documents that can be read by computer. Once across, she boarded a bus to the Iris Avenue Trolley station, getting off at Palm Avenue, then taking another bus to the Home Depot.